Thursday, July 23, 2015

Driving While Black, Female and Fearless

By Sikivu Hutchinson

As a black woman motorist alone, Sandra Bland’s apprehension
and subsequent death underscores the race and gender regime of mobility in the
U.S. For many white people, having the
freedom to get behind the wheel of a car is a birthright as critical to
American national identity as the delusion that the U.S. is the greatest
country on the planet. Historically, cars
have been associated with masculine freedom, rugged individualism and Manifest
Destiny, especially vis-à-vis highway development and the destruction of poor
urban communities.

Unlimited access to the open road was a white privilege symbolized
by the U.S.’ massive investment in suburbia and interstate highways in the 1950s. During the Jim Crow era, African Americans
were supposed to yield to
white drivers on the road. Failure to do
so could mean a traffic ticket, a beating or death. As Stetson Kennedy stresses in the book Jim Crow Guide to the USA, for Southern black
drivers, “When on wheels you were to do as on foot”. Black drivers are routinely stopped and searched at greater rates than are whites. From the colonists to Kerouac, free, unlimited, boundary-free travel has always been a hallmark of white Americana.

Getting behind the wheel, Bland had three strikes against
her. She was black, female and fearless,
a combination that is antithetical to white-centered narratives
of driving and freedom in the U.S. She was perceived as criminal and unruly, a loud
black “bitch” not worthy of the feminine privileges and niceties conferred to
respectable white women. Rightly challenging
the actions of the officer who stopped her, she was an uppity harridan who clearly
did not know her place. Texas D.A. Elton
Mathis’ comments that Bland was not a “model” person highlight the dominant perception
of black women. It is a perception that
is always laced with sexual disruption and moral failing. Black women’s bodies are always constructed
as bodies out of place; uneasily positioned between the binary of masculine and
feminine.

This is especially pronounced in public discourse on
policing and criminalization in which black women’s experiences are still devalued
by the mainstream. In its new report, “Say Her Name:
Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women”, the African American Policy
Forum notes that: “Even where women and girls are present in the data,
narratives framing police profiling and lethal force as exclusively male
experiences lead researchers, the media, and advocates to exclude them. For
example, although racial profiling data are rarely, if ever, disaggregated by
gender and race, when race and gender are considered together, researchers find
that ‘for both men and women there is an identical pattern of stops by race/
ethnicity.’” Why do researchers and
policy makers overlook this egregious dynamic and solely focus on African
American males in public discourse? The
marginalization of black women in U.S. civil and human rights policy is a
phenomenon that extends back to slavery.
As field laborers, mothers, breeders and domestics, black women
fulfilled multiple roles that simultaneously reinforced and defied “normative” gender
boundaries. Black women were never
centered as the primary victims of racist terrorism. As feminist theorist and writer bell hooks argues,
antebellum narratives of black brutalization often privileged black men, black
patriarchy and black men’s stolen right to assume the normal role of patriarch
under white supremacy. One of the
principal recommendations of the notorious 1965
Moynihan Report was that black men should be given the social capital to become
responsible patriarchs. Restoring hetero-normative
nuclear black families would redeem, stabilize and correct “matriarchal” black
families and chaotic black communities.

In many regards, failure to acknowledge, much less centralize,
black women’s experiences with state violence is part of Moynihan’s
racist/sexist/heterosexist legacy. As
the AAPF report notes, “both the incidents and consequences of state violence
against Black women are often informed by their roles as primary caretakers of
people of all ages in their communities. As a result, violence against them has
ripple effects throughout families and neighborhoods. Black women are
positioned at the center of the domestic sphere and of community life.” In New York City, where African Americans are
27% of the population, black women were stopped
53.4% of the time and black men 55.7% of the time, a tiny difference in
representation. True to their long history of being victimized
by state sanctioned sexual violence, black women are more likely to suffer
sexualized violence during police encounters or in police custody. Further, trans, lesbian and gender
non-conforming black women are often subject to homophobic and transphobic
language which officers use to call their gender identities and sexuality into
question (e.g., “threats to ‘rape them straight’”). Entrenched homophobia and transphobia among
police mean that trans, lesbian and gender non-conforming black women are less
likely to be viewed as “proper” victims and/or targets of violent crime.

This racist sexist theme of culpability—i.e., “the black
bitch deserved it”—is a recurring one in mainstream perceptions of black women’s
inability to be victims. After the
dashcam footage of Bland’s arrest was released thousands of online commenters
rushed in to vilify her as a “thugette” who provoked the officer’s response and,
presumably, her own death. In a culture
in which black female bodies are racialized and sexualized as out of place, black
women are never granted the space of the open road, the freedom to be mobile,
self-determined or fearless without permission.
Sandra Bland didn’t ask for it.